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My father is a truck driver. He made his living driving vehicles and doing heavy lifting and menial work. Truck driving is just the latest evolution in his "car

My father is a truck driver. He made his living driving vehicles and doing heavy lifting and menial work. Truck driving is just the latest evolution in his "career" and I'm ever grateful to him for battering his body in various ways to ensure I had every opportunity available to myself. We talk a lot about his job. It's not fun. He works long hours, a lot of it is mundane driving, and he sits idle a lot of the time. I think he would be the first to agree that automation of his job is inevitable and likely necessary, given the dangers of truck driving. Hurling a multi-ton vehicle to and fro is a dangerous task at the best of times. But therein lies the rub. We are just now reaching the point where we as a society are getting comfortable with automated cars. I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. HN readers will understand that these cars are still a ways away, since the last 10% of the work required for true automation will take a lot longer to develop. Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more. And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. It will happen, and it should happen. But it won't be easy, nor soon. Of course, I'd be happy to be wrong, and I'm sure my dad would be too.

samcheng 11y ago
The geometry- and mechanically- related tasks seem like they would be ripe for automation. For example, the trailer reversing problem is related to the inverted pendulum problem, which is easily solvable by automated systems. The judgement for when to stop with an unsafe load and wayfinding at the last 100 yards of a route are indeed tasks that I'd prefer to leave to a human for the time being. Maybe we'll have 'dock pilots' like we do for large cargo ships?
- wheresmypasswd 11y ago
  Build a robot that balances this broomstick was a sophomore-level engineering course at my university. xD
tempestn 11y ago
The article actually mentions that initially we will need human drivers to get the trucks on and off the freeway: "We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over."
- HorizonXP 11y ago
  I was referring more to the inner-city manoeuvring, and within loading/unloading zones. Getting a trailer lined up with the loading dock isn't an easy task at all. It can be automated, but it's the variability between load length, weight, and the loading dock's surroundings that make it difficult. A comment below talked about harbour pilots. That seems like a great idea.
  - martin1975 11y ago
    Lexus automated the most hated driving maneuver for all car drivers - parallel parking, and Google's had decent success w/their self driving Prii fleet... it's hard, safety would be the #1 concern, but w/enough human brainpower and some decent hard realtime OS-es, it should be more than doable.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    But my point, and the one made by the article as I understand it, is that you wouldn't even have to do any of that initially. The vast majority of the driver's time is spent just cruising on the highway. That's the part you want to work on automating first, both because it provides the greatest cost savings, and because it's the easiest to solve technically.
mac01021 11y ago
Interesting... They may have humans do all the manoeuvring within the distribution hubs long after they've automated all of the street driving. Shifting and braking, though, seem to me like the kind of thing that automata should be good at. And I suppose that, once most of the cars on the road are autonomous, the streets will be much more truck-friendly.
- yock 11y ago
  Sort of reminds me of a Harbor Pilot[0]. A person who holds unique knowledge of how to operate a large vehicle in a particular piece of confined geography. 0: http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot
  - mac01021 11y ago
    Neat! I doubt a "hub driver" will earn a 6-figure salary, but manoeuvring a semi truck two or three trailers is definitely a skilled job that many (most?) people are not capable of learning to do well.
patejam 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they start out with "last mile" drivers to deal with off-highway driving.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains.
  - HorizonXP 11y ago
    Tell that to the companies that ship items long-haul via trucks. It confuses me too, but somehow, I guess the economics work out.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    > For long haul, you can just use trains. RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore. Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions: 1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead. 3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt. 4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology. There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks). Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified... Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet! 5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)... Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!
enraged_camel 11y ago
>>Trucks are way more complicated to drive. An Australian friend of mine told me that the trucks that carry load from Australian mining fields are almost fully automated, and have been for a while now. So perhaps it's not that complicated?
- jacalata 11y ago
  They may have been thinking of trucks within the mine site, which is still quite new? (http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-wor...). I'm pretty sure we don't have any automated trucks on Australian roads.
- tomlock 11y ago
  This is mostly internal to mine sites, and the areas serviced have restricted or no public traffic.
ctvo 11y ago
> Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more. The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem. Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.
- jmspring 11y ago
  Mechanical aspects, may be easy. Modeling human behavior and reacting to it, not so much. I suspect it will still be years before much of trucking is automated. Why? It's not just the take crap from point A to point B, it's also being responsible for making sure what was ordered is actually loaded. It will be years before, say, the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast) automates their work staff or actually has their schedules down tight. Trucking and hauling is full of inefficiencies, and those that suffer the most are the drivers. A pickup/dropoff that takes too long because the people at the origin/destination are lazy/slow/don't care/behind has a ripple effect. And, one could argue "but automated trucks, what schedule?", there will still need to be a human present, regardless. I suspect said human will be restrained by rules similar to what drivers experience now.
  - ori_b 11y ago
    But we've already got automated warehousing systems that work pretty well -- I'd imagine these wouldn't be too hard to extend to load and unload trucks. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they already can.
    - jmspring 11y ago
      Where is the money going to come from for produce suppliers, some on thin profits, to automate where hiring a bunch of seasonal laborers is less overhead, maintenance, etc.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
Are you sure they're more complicated for computers? Because some stuff that strains humans, like 360° attention and complicated sequential activities, computers can do with ease. Also computers are not limited to having senses inside the cab. Load shifting? BigDog is an example of computers figuring how to balance a shifting load. Google cars handle being cut off (most of the time).
- pm24601 11y ago
  Google cars are going no more than 25 mph and are lightweight. Different thing all together. Here is the big thing - the driverless truck has to operate in a uncontrolled environment that can result in human death. Who is the responsible party? The trucking company? The software developer? Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics. Can this be done? Maybe. But at what cost? It might be that the best role for the computer is helping a truck driver be safer -- not to replace the truck driver.
  - maccard 11y ago
    I'm walking down a busy road with traffic passing me at ~30mph at the moment. Anecdotally, the last 4 cars have had one person in the car who has either been texting on a mobile phone, applying makeup, eating breakfast, and playing with the radio. Do you think the reaction time of the guy who's texting his boss saying he's late would be faster or slower than the driverless car that was in a long garbage collection, if I were to step in front of him? You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.
    - pm24601 11y ago
      Yeap. And if one of them hits you, they are liable. How many software developers want to be held criminally responsible for deaths? Some times we get so fascinated by technology, that we forget that the technology has to fit within human society. Remember the whole concept of product/market fit - if the market rejects the product: it doesn't matter how "cool" the technology is.
imgabe 11y ago
I think it could help that loading docks could be highly integrated with the truck systems. Backing in to the place where you unload is complicated, but the owners would be willing to invest in putting in sensors, special paint, whatever else is necessary to make that as automated and error free as possible.
eggy 11y ago
We've gotten used to huge commercial airliners flying on autopilot. Granted they have humans on board, but ask any pilot how much flying they do. Even helicopters can be put on autopilot after take-off. That's what the helicopters that run from Macau to Hong Kong many times a day are doing. I can see ironing out the kinks - pedestrians, roadblocks, car stops in front abruptly, etc... I would think you could have a truck lane only like the ones for buses entering the Lincoln Tunnel in NYC, and perhaps a guardrail that could have sections removed to open it up for traffic during less traffic times?
- bglazer 11y ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which commercial airline flight is automated. For example, most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions.
  - eggy 11y ago
    Jeez, I admit I am, was now, one of those people!...changes flight to train ticket... ;)
  - throwaway_xx9 11y ago
    > "most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions." As a commercially-rated pilot I would be shocked, too - since few airport runways are certified for Cat III landings, and that's only under restricted wind speeds. And even after autoland in fog, a pilot still taxis up to the gate.
patrickg_zill 11y ago
If everything was smooth and regular, trucks wouldn't have a problem. However, the roads, and the warehouse yards, are not. A fully loaded truck traveling 55mph (on some roads they are allowed 65 or even 75) can weigh 80,000 lbs or more (in Canada under certain circumstances, 139,500 lbs). That is a tremendous amount of force that must be handled properly 100% of the time, through rain, hail, sleet, snow - and with smaller cars weaving in and out of traffic all around them.
- rndmize 11y ago
  It's already not handled 100% of the time. I'll settle for 75% less freeway blocking by crashed big rigs.
  - patrickg_zill 11y ago
    I am hopeful that robots can fix it, but most likely it will take a little bit longer... robot trucks will save on fuel, brakes, and tires, as they can be programmed to minimize sudden acceleration and taking a turn too quickly (scrubs rubbers off the tires).
    - taivare 11y ago
      Having driven in winter weather I can honestly say it will be a while . . before they are ready to take over. As for tire wear , there are small firms that look for very experienced driver's to cheat the scales . . this is how its done if they are overweight , think ( steel coils ) they time it so they hit the scales at night . . the driver goes into the scale and positions the rear trailer wheels on one side . . up on the curb registering a lower weight on the scale.
mc32 11y ago
At least long-distance trucks can have routes optimized for automation (be it via embedding sensors to aid in bad weather or optimizing a lane for trucks, etc.) for the long segments and then at the city limits (or thereabouts) set-up truck "depots" to have human drivers board the truck and give them override to manoeuver through more difficult city or rural last-segment roads and streets.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same - including the truck form factor. Without the required creature comforts of the tractor, you free up a lot of energy (heat/cool) and space (bed/TV etc...) in the cab. I can also see traffic lanes being created to support commerce, special easement areas for trucks at stops that don't have to support showers/food/bathrooms etc... reducing overall cost. All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.
- pm24601 11y ago
  > All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable. I disagree. Specifically, you are assuming that the human workers will quietly accept their fate.
  - djrogers 11y ago
    Not quietly, no, but it's no less inevitable. History is full of jobs that have been automated away, and few of those historical examples offered a more obvious and large payoff.
    - pm24601 11y ago
      I do notice you are avoiding my central point: With railroads, there is not an economic incentive for automation. One commentator suggested that driverless trucks would have to be separated from human drivers. Railroads have this thing called "tracks" Another suggested the wonderful advantage of a driverless truck not getting into accidents. Railroads have an excellent safety record. Driverless trucks as a way to reduce the need to spend money on humans. Railroads need only 2 humans for 100+ unit train that is equivalent to 300 or so trucks. ( 1 railcar = 3 truckloads https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/Carload/ https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/C... ) Trains are 10x more ( http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technology-due-for-a-21st-century-revival/ http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technol... ) more energy efficient than trucks. What is the economic model to use driverless trucks? Sure the trucking industry will push for this. But the railroad industry has so many natural advantages.
verytrivial 11y ago
> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car debris.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  If I had to bet, that's the way I see it playing out. In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them. The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.
- taneq 11y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised. This is where a huge amount of real-world automation ends up; it ends up being much more practical to only automate the 90% of the job that can be done by a simple automaton, and mechanical-Turk the rest. Then you save 90% of the labour costs AND 90% of the R&D costs for the automation.
- illumin8 11y ago
  The article says so. The plan is to have human drivers in each city drive the "last mile" from the interstate freeway exit to the destination. The current autonomous technology is only effective on freeways, so having human drivers drop the truck off at the interstate, and pick it up again solves the temporary problem of not having 100% effective automation of city driving/trailer parking.
  - 11y ago
wainstead 11y ago
> I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. Unless the truck somehow acknowledges adjacent vehicles in a comforting way. I don't know what that would look like, but it would probably be coupled with advertising and data collection (no law against filming all the cars around you and what they are doing).
kamaal 11y ago
>>And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. My first airplane journey was fascinating. As some one who doesn't know how to drive a car, and is struggling trying to learn it, I was spell bound when I watched the pilot taxi the huge airplane to the terminal. Well airplanes aren't even regular shaped and size of the human taxi'ing the plane to the plane is very small. Yet the pilot could precision park to the terminal. The fact is no matter how hard it seems, if you've been doing it day in and out, it looks like just another job at the end.

samcheng 11y ago

The geometry- and mechanically- related tasks seem like they would be ripe for automation. For example, the trailer reversing problem is related to the inverted pendulum problem, which is easily solvable by automated systems. The judgement for when to stop with an unsafe load and wayfinding at the last 100 yards of a route are indeed tasks that I'd prefer to leave to a human for the time being. Maybe we'll have 'dock pilots' like we do for large cargo ships?

wheresmypasswd 11y ago
Build a robot that balances this broomstick was a sophomore-level engineering course at my university. xD

tempestn 11y ago

The article actually mentions that initially we will need human drivers to get the trucks on and off the freeway: "We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over."

HorizonXP 11y ago
I was referring more to the inner-city manoeuvring, and within loading/unloading zones. Getting a trailer lined up with the loading dock isn't an easy task at all. It can be automated, but it's the variability between load length, weight, and the loading dock's surroundings that make it difficult. A comment below talked about harbour pilots. That seems like a great idea.
- martin1975 11y ago
  Lexus automated the most hated driving maneuver for all car drivers - parallel parking, and Google's had decent success w/their self driving Prii fleet... it's hard, safety would be the #1 concern, but w/enough human brainpower and some decent hard realtime OS-es, it should be more than doable.
- tempestn 11y ago
  But my point, and the one made by the article as I understand it, is that you wouldn't even have to do any of that initially. The vast majority of the driver's time is spent just cruising on the highway. That's the part you want to work on automating first, both because it provides the greatest cost savings, and because it's the easiest to solve technically.

mac01021 11y ago

Interesting... They may have humans do all the manoeuvring within the distribution hubs long after they've automated all of the street driving. Shifting and braking, though, seem to me like the kind of thing that automata should be good at. And I suppose that, once most of the cars on the road are autonomous, the streets will be much more truck-friendly.

yock 11y ago
Sort of reminds me of a Harbor Pilot[0]. A person who holds unique knowledge of how to operate a large vehicle in a particular piece of confined geography. 0: http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot
- mac01021 11y ago
  Neat! I doubt a "hub driver" will earn a 6-figure salary, but manoeuvring a semi truck two or three trailers is definitely a skilled job that many (most?) people are not capable of learning to do well.

patejam 11y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they start out with "last mile" drivers to deal with off-highway driving.

thescriptkiddie 11y ago
But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains.
- HorizonXP 11y ago
  Tell that to the companies that ship items long-haul via trucks. It confuses me too, but somehow, I guess the economics work out.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > For long haul, you can just use trains. RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore. Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions: 1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead. 3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt. 4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology. There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks). Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified... Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet! 5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)... Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!

enraged_camel 11y ago

>>Trucks are way more complicated to drive. An Australian friend of mine told me that the trucks that carry load from Australian mining fields are almost fully automated, and have been for a while now. So perhaps it's not that complicated?

jacalata 11y ago
They may have been thinking of trucks within the mine site, which is still quite new? (http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-wor...). I'm pretty sure we don't have any automated trucks on Australian roads.
tomlock 11y ago
This is mostly internal to mine sites, and the areas serviced have restricted or no public traffic.

ctvo 11y ago

> Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more. The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem. Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.

jmspring 11y ago
Mechanical aspects, may be easy. Modeling human behavior and reacting to it, not so much. I suspect it will still be years before much of trucking is automated. Why? It's not just the take crap from point A to point B, it's also being responsible for making sure what was ordered is actually loaded. It will be years before, say, the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast) automates their work staff or actually has their schedules down tight. Trucking and hauling is full of inefficiencies, and those that suffer the most are the drivers. A pickup/dropoff that takes too long because the people at the origin/destination are lazy/slow/don't care/behind has a ripple effect. And, one could argue "but automated trucks, what schedule?", there will still need to be a human present, regardless. I suspect said human will be restrained by rules similar to what drivers experience now.
- ori_b 11y ago
  But we've already got automated warehousing systems that work pretty well -- I'd imagine these wouldn't be too hard to extend to load and unload trucks. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they already can.
  - jmspring 11y ago
    Where is the money going to come from for produce suppliers, some on thin profits, to automate where hiring a bunch of seasonal laborers is less overhead, maintenance, etc.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

Are you sure they're more complicated for computers? Because some stuff that strains humans, like 360° attention and complicated sequential activities, computers can do with ease. Also computers are not limited to having senses inside the cab. Load shifting? BigDog is an example of computers figuring how to balance a shifting load. Google cars handle being cut off (most of the time).

pm24601 11y ago
Google cars are going no more than 25 mph and are lightweight. Different thing all together. Here is the big thing - the driverless truck has to operate in a uncontrolled environment that can result in human death. Who is the responsible party? The trucking company? The software developer? Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics. Can this be done? Maybe. But at what cost? It might be that the best role for the computer is helping a truck driver be safer -- not to replace the truck driver.
- maccard 11y ago
  I'm walking down a busy road with traffic passing me at ~30mph at the moment. Anecdotally, the last 4 cars have had one person in the car who has either been texting on a mobile phone, applying makeup, eating breakfast, and playing with the radio. Do you think the reaction time of the guy who's texting his boss saying he's late would be faster or slower than the driverless car that was in a long garbage collection, if I were to step in front of him? You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.
  - pm24601 11y ago
    Yeap. And if one of them hits you, they are liable. How many software developers want to be held criminally responsible for deaths? Some times we get so fascinated by technology, that we forget that the technology has to fit within human society. Remember the whole concept of product/market fit - if the market rejects the product: it doesn't matter how "cool" the technology is.

imgabe 11y ago

I think it could help that loading docks could be highly integrated with the truck systems. Backing in to the place where you unload is complicated, but the owners would be willing to invest in putting in sensors, special paint, whatever else is necessary to make that as automated and error free as possible.

eggy 11y ago

We've gotten used to huge commercial airliners flying on autopilot. Granted they have humans on board, but ask any pilot how much flying they do. Even helicopters can be put on autopilot after take-off. That's what the helicopters that run from Macau to Hong Kong many times a day are doing. I can see ironing out the kinks - pedestrians, roadblocks, car stops in front abruptly, etc... I would think you could have a truck lane only like the ones for buses entering the Lincoln Tunnel in NYC, and perhaps a guardrail that could have sections removed to open it up for traffic during less traffic times?

bglazer 11y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which commercial airline flight is automated. For example, most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions.
- eggy 11y ago
  Jeez, I admit I am, was now, one of those people!...changes flight to train ticket... ;)
- throwaway_xx9 11y ago
  > "most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions." As a commercially-rated pilot I would be shocked, too - since few airport runways are certified for Cat III landings, and that's only under restricted wind speeds. And even after autoland in fog, a pilot still taxis up to the gate.

patrickg_zill 11y ago

If everything was smooth and regular, trucks wouldn't have a problem. However, the roads, and the warehouse yards, are not. A fully loaded truck traveling 55mph (on some roads they are allowed 65 or even 75) can weigh 80,000 lbs or more (in Canada under certain circumstances, 139,500 lbs). That is a tremendous amount of force that must be handled properly 100% of the time, through rain, hail, sleet, snow - and with smaller cars weaving in and out of traffic all around them.

rndmize 11y ago
It's already not handled 100% of the time. I'll settle for 75% less freeway blocking by crashed big rigs.
- patrickg_zill 11y ago
  I am hopeful that robots can fix it, but most likely it will take a little bit longer... robot trucks will save on fuel, brakes, and tires, as they can be programmed to minimize sudden acceleration and taking a turn too quickly (scrubs rubbers off the tires).
  - taivare 11y ago
    Having driven in winter weather I can honestly say it will be a while . . before they are ready to take over. As for tire wear , there are small firms that look for very experienced driver's to cheat the scales . . this is how its done if they are overweight , think ( steel coils ) they time it so they hit the scales at night . . the driver goes into the scale and positions the rear trailer wheels on one side . . up on the curb registering a lower weight on the scale.

mc32 11y ago

At least long-distance trucks can have routes optimized for automation (be it via embedding sensors to aid in bad weather or optimizing a lane for trucks, etc.) for the long segments and then at the city limits (or thereabouts) set-up truck "depots" to have human drivers board the truck and give them override to manoeuver through more difficult city or rural last-segment roads and streets.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same - including the truck form factor. Without the required creature comforts of the tractor, you free up a lot of energy (heat/cool) and space (bed/TV etc...) in the cab. I can also see traffic lanes being created to support commerce, special easement areas for trucks at stops that don't have to support showers/food/bathrooms etc... reducing overall cost. All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.

pm24601 11y ago
> All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable. I disagree. Specifically, you are assuming that the human workers will quietly accept their fate.
- djrogers 11y ago
  Not quietly, no, but it's no less inevitable. History is full of jobs that have been automated away, and few of those historical examples offered a more obvious and large payoff.
  - pm24601 11y ago
    I do notice you are avoiding my central point: With railroads, there is not an economic incentive for automation. One commentator suggested that driverless trucks would have to be separated from human drivers. Railroads have this thing called "tracks" Another suggested the wonderful advantage of a driverless truck not getting into accidents. Railroads have an excellent safety record. Driverless trucks as a way to reduce the need to spend money on humans. Railroads need only 2 humans for 100+ unit train that is equivalent to 300 or so trucks. ( 1 railcar = 3 truckloads https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/Carload/ https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/C... ) Trains are 10x more ( http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technology-due-for-a-21st-century-revival/ http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technol... ) more energy efficient than trucks. What is the economic model to use driverless trucks? Sure the trucking industry will push for this. But the railroad industry has so many natural advantages.

verytrivial 11y ago

> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car debris.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
If I had to bet, that's the way I see it playing out. In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them. The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.
taneq 11y ago
I wouldn't be surprised. This is where a huge amount of real-world automation ends up; it ends up being much more practical to only automate the 90% of the job that can be done by a simple automaton, and mechanical-Turk the rest. Then you save 90% of the labour costs AND 90% of the R&D costs for the automation.
illumin8 11y ago
The article says so. The plan is to have human drivers in each city drive the "last mile" from the interstate freeway exit to the destination. The current autonomous technology is only effective on freeways, so having human drivers drop the truck off at the interstate, and pick it up again solves the temporary problem of not having 100% effective automation of city driving/trailer parking.
- 11y ago

wainstead 11y ago

> I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. Unless the truck somehow acknowledges adjacent vehicles in a comforting way. I don't know what that would look like, but it would probably be coupled with advertising and data collection (no law against filming all the cars around you and what they are doing).

kamaal 11y ago

>>And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. My first airplane journey was fascinating. As some one who doesn't know how to drive a car, and is struggling trying to learn it, I was spell bound when I watched the pilot taxi the huge airplane to the terminal. Well airplanes aren't even regular shaped and size of the human taxi'ing the plane to the plane is very small. Yet the pilot could precision park to the terminal. The fact is no matter how hard it seems, if you've been doing it day in and out, it looks like just another job at the end.